Lost Heroes, Missing Money Podcast

On a cold winter morning, a small plane was on its way to Lunken Airport in Cincinnati, Ohio, when something went terribly wrong. Four FBI agents, a confessed bank embezzler, and his representative were on their way to find stolen cash allegedly buried in the Cincinnati area.

Audio Transcript

Chief Rob Penny: 0:00
I remember it like it was yesterday. It was December 16th, 1982, around 933 in the morning.

Retired Firefighter Frank Lerner: 0:07
We were all standing there talking. And also in that plane just went right across in front of us. Oh, my God.

Victoria Morgroum: 0:14
All I saw was fire and smoke. I was just standing there watching the hysterics and I didn’t know what to do.

Chief Paul Wright: 0:25
We did not know that there were FBI agents on the plane. We just thought there was a plane crash.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 0:32
On a cold winter morning. Something goes terribly wrong in a small plane on its way to London Airport. Here’s a reenactment of the air traffic control transcript.

Air Traffic Control: 0:41
IDAHO seven four Cincinnati approach. IDAHO seven four Cincinnati approach radar contact lost how do you hear me? IDAHO seven four Cincinnati approach. IDAHO seven four if you hear me contact Lunken Tower one one eight point seven. IDAHO seven four Cincinnati.

Amy Frederick: 1:13
As air traffic controllers try desperately to contact the plane, the small twin-engine Cessna 411 snap threw utility wires and poles on Shelley Lane and Main Street. Witnesses said the plane came loud and low before crashing into the Shepherd bookstore. The impact moved the old farmhouse feet off its foundation. The plane then burst into flames, reaching as much as 1000 degrees.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 1:38
For FBI agents. An accused bank embezzler and his representative were killed on impact. They were on their way to find stolen cash allegedly buried in the Cincinnati area. Welcome to Loss Heroes, Missing Money, where your host, Matthew Vanderhorst and Amy Frederick. Our story begins at Mixed Field in Chicago, Illinois, where four FBI agents Robert Connors, Terry Hereford, Mike Lynch and Charles Ellington boarded the small plane that was bound for London Airport. Agents Connors, Hereford and Ellington had been FBI agents for three years while Mike Lynch was with the department for six years. Retired FBI spokesman Ross Rice explains their mission.

Retired FBI Agent Ross Rice: 2:19
I knew two of the agents very well, Mike Lynch and Charles Ellington. They both worked together on a white-collar crime squad, an organized crime squad. They were the principal investigators on the fraud case that led to their flying to Ohio in the first place. They had investigated, charged and convicted a person that had embezzled a large sum of money from, I believe it was their employer. And part of the money, some of the money was allegedly hidden in a park in Montgomery or near Montgomery. And they were flying down there with this suspect as part of a plea agreement to try and find and recover those funds.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 3:02
In August of 1975, Johnson disappeared along with $600,000 of the bank’s money, which went missing from a vault. Investigators say Johnson briefly lived in Cincinnati in 1975, shortly after he disappeared from Chicago.

Amy Frederick: 3:17
Johnson resurfaced December 2nd, 1982, when he surrendered to FBI agents in Chicago, saying he wanted to return a substantial amount of money. According to the FBI, Johnson told investigators he had taken the bank’s money and split it up, hiding the cash in different areas. Johnson’s attorney stated that Johnson was under great pressure when he and the money vanished. The money reappeared first as 92,000 on a pew in a Glenview church. Another $52,000 in the bedroom of his parents Chicago home.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 3:48
On December ten, Johnson led FBI agents to a remote Chicago forest preserve where the unearth $50,000 of the stolen money. He also led agents with $24,000 in a downtown Chicago bank deposit box. Johnson said he hit another $50,000 in the Cincinnati area and told agents he would lead them to the money. Carl Henry Johnson was being accompanied by 68 year old Patrick Daly, a retired Chicago police detective who was working for a lawyer that represented Johnson. Agent Mike Lynch had started with the FBI in 1976. He and his wife and their four small children lived near Chicago. His daughter, Joanie Konstantopoulos, was seven years old in 1982. She says she knew her father was an FBI agent.

Joni Konstantelos: 4:31
We knew what our dad did, but we didn’t really know the danger. It just wasn’t something that we really ever talked about or thought about or worried about. And so that day when he left, we knew he was going to Cincinnati. We knew that he was flying on a plane. It was just sort of any typical day.

Amy Frederick: 4:48
According to the FBI, it was normal procedure for two FBI agents to fly the plane. This plane was being piloted by Robert Connors and Terry Halford. Both men were veteran FBI agents and licensed commercial pilots. As the plane made its way to Lincoln Airport, disaster happened in the city of Montgomery.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 5:06
During this time in 1982, Montgomery’s fire department was located on Cooper Road. On December 16th, firefighters had just completed a training session. Montgomery firefighters Mark Starkey, Paul Wright, Frank Lerner and Rob Penny describe what they saw. The station’s second floor window.

Retired Firefighter Mark Stagge: 5:23
Training was just getting ready to end when somebody yelled a little bit of an obscenity and there was a plane going right by the window of the firehouse. It hit the top of a building and then ended up smashing into the Shepherd’s Bookstore.

Chief Paul Wright: 5:38
We were upstairs training for the day, and one of the firefighters had seen the plane go across the front of the building. And I can remember walking to the side of the the station, you know, to see what he had seen and looked out at the corner of Cooper and Main Street. And I saw this tremendous fireball explode down at the corner. I still can remember seeing that.

Retired Firefighter Frank Lerner: 6:03
He was in trouble. We just couldn’t figure out why he was so low and he was on the side. And you knew he was in trouble just to see where he was. You knew something was going to happen.

Chief Rob Penny: 6:13
I ran over to the window, and as soon as I could comprehend that something happened, a ball of flame just rolled.

Amy Frederick: 6:22
The plane clipped trees and power lines before finally crashing into the Rock Foundation of Sheppard’s bookstore. The plane bursts into flames, sending fire through the old wood frame building. Victoria Marjoram was 12 years old in 1982. She was home sick from school that day. Her house was located across the street from Sheppard’s Bookstore. Victoria describes what she saw.

Victoria Morgroum: 6:44
They had a sound. It was such an odd sound. It sounded as if it was a freight train. Like I could hear engines. I’m like, What? What is that? And then the house started shaking. And then all of a sudden, I heard an explosion. My house shook. The noise was indescribable.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 7:10
Before firefighters arrived at the scene, witnesses scrambled to the burning building to try and help anyone who may have been inside. Two witnesses described to WCPO News how they tried to help.

Bystander: 7:23
We saw approximately 7 to 8 people. It was probably more, but there were seven or eight that we could make out. We’ve brought Mrs. Sheppard out around the back and she said her husband was an invalid up on the second floor, was still in there, and there were several people laying around on the ground just to get into one of the corner ends of the house, split open and just too much smoke. I guess I’m smoking my lungs and I made it about halfway through the room and I didn’t see nobody. So I went back out over to the other side of the house. We kicked out a couple of basement windows. There was the woman said some people down the basement. We kicked in some windows and we couldn’t see nobody in the basement.

Amy Frederick: 7:57
Bookstore owner Olga Shepherd and several others escaped the burning bookstore.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 8:03
Firefighter Frank Lerner arrived at the scene and saw a woman trapped in her burning station wagon. 51 year old Phyllis Snyder, a housewife and mother of the eight children, had gone to the Shepherds Bookstore to Christmas shop. She had just pulled into the parking lot when their plane crash happened near became trapped in her car.

Retired Firefighter Frank Lerner: 8:20
And a couple of people had pointed out there was a woman trapped in a car. We were trying and trying to get that door open. I just got mad. A car was on fire. She had that look on her face. I couldn’t see that she was burnt at that point because I was just focusing on getting her out. But I guess it was just panic at that point and you got to get her out.

Amy Frederick: 8:43
Phyllis’s husband, Don Neyer, was working in Cincinnati. He remembers getting the call about the crash and his wife’s injuries.

Don Neyer: 8:52
They said, Well, your wife was at the hospital. A volunteer fireman from the station on Cooper Road was there at the time. He was there and he heard a woman screaming and got on the other side of the passenger side. And we some kind of an implement he had without success. He tried to get it open. He then, in frustration, grabbed the passenger, the passenger side door, pulled the door off its hinges. It was just, you know, and then he cut her seatbelt and pulled her out. And then they took it into the burn unit over at University Hospital.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 9:31
During the chaos at the scene. Victoria saw bookstore owner Joseph Shepherd fighting his way out a second floor window and onto the roof of the porch. Shepherd was 83 years old and unable to walk.

Victoria Morgroum: 9:43
I just didn’t really know what was going on. And then it was at that point, I saw old Man Shepherd. Everybody called him Old Man Shepherd, and he was hanging out of the window and he was trying to crawl out on the roof. Mrs. Shepard started screaming for her husband.

Chief Paul Wright: 10:03
The window had been painted and nailed shut, and so they didn’t think you could get it open. But he had gotten that open, obviously, knowing that he needed to get out of there and crawled out on the roof.

Chief Rob Penny: 10:15
The one thing I do remember that I thought about the most was the bullets were firing in the guns of the FBI agents. So when we were going past the wreckage and trying to rescue Mr. Shepard, we could hear the guns firing. And that that was a concern because I’m thinking this is going to hurt any minute now. I’m going to get hit with a bullet. So and they were firing a lot. I mean, it just pow, pow, pow, pow. Just going, going, going. So it was that was that was a big concern with that. And then the other big concern was not knowing who, you know, was a bookstore. So we didn’t know how many people were inside there. We were just gearing for the worst.

Amy Frederick: 10:58
At the same time, Rob Penney just happened to see Mr. Shepard on top of the roof of the porch.

Chief Rob Penny: 11:04
I just happened to get a clearing of smoke enough to see a guy sitting on the roof. And apparently it was old man Shepherd and he was upstairs in his bedroom the way they lived on the second floor. I don’t know if he was a paraplegic. So for him to be able to pull himself out of that window and get on our roof was it was amazing that I mean, I don’t think he was a guy that could walk. So when we saw him, then I got with a couple of mutual aid companies that were there and they got a ladder up and we brought him down from there, so we pulled him off of the roof.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 11:38
While Rob Penny saved Joseph Shepherd, the other firefighters were entering the burning bookstore, which was filled with both flames and smoke.

Chief Paul Wright: 11:45
And I can remember hitting it with the water. And it was kind of curious because the fire wasn’t going out as fast as I thought it should have gone out. So then it kind of occurred to me if a plane crashed there, I guess there’s aviation fuel that had sprayed into the building. And that’s probably why we were having a hard time getting the fire out.

Chief Rob Penny: 12:03
We took a hose line, we went inside and we put water on the first room and then we were in what we used to be, the old kitchen. And we put that out and we started heading down the hallway into the other house. And when we did, the house just went boom and shook. And when we look back, the whole rooms that we just put out just reignited because of that fuel that was in there and we knocked it out, but the fuel was still there. So as soon as it hit an ignition spot, it just lit back up. We had to run back through the fire. We tried to put out a little bit. We ran back, we dived out to windows to get back outside. And then once we figured out what was going on, we thought we got to make a little bit different attack here. We ended up I think we ended up getting foam and putting the foam together. So it was a mess trying to put it out because of the ignition of all the fuel and everything.

Victoria Morgroum: 13:01
So when the plane crashed, it nose dived under the stone wall so you couldn’t see anything because it was engulfed in flames. So I couldn’t tell what it was.

Chief Rob Penny: 13:11
We really thought that we really thought we weren’t going to make it out of there. When that house reignited on us, when we were right in the middle of it, we were right inside. And it’s like the only way out is the way we came in, you know, because we had the hose line going that way and we had to use that for our protection. So we were we didn’t know if we were going to make it back out there or not. Be honest with you.

Chief Paul Wright: 13:32
At that time, we did not know that there were FBI agents on the plane. We just thought there was a plane crash. A lot of it had melted by now. So it was hard to see. You couldn’t really see a plane there. It was just a pile of melted aluminum and all the cabling from the aircraft.

Amy Frederick: 13:50
It took firefighters several hours to put the fire out. All six men in the plane died on impact. It was the job of firefighters to remove the victims from the wreckage.

Retired Firefighter Mark Stagge: 14:01
And were later on the day they set up a temporary morgue at the old firehouse there on Cooper Road where they took care of things and took care of the bodies until investigations and everything could go on.

Chief Paul Wright: 14:13
And that’s when they started saying, well, you know, we’re FBI agents. We can’t put any I.D. on. However, we believe this is a plane that carried some of our agents. We’re just trying to confirm that. So that’s when about the time we started realizing that this was something more than just an average plane coming out of the sky.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 14:30
Thank you for listening to Lost Heroes Missing money. Join us in part two of our story when family members and friends learn of the terrible tragedy.

Joni Konstantelos: 14:38
I remember walking home from school that day, kind of coming down the hill, and seeing several cars parked in front of my house.

Retired FBI Agent Ross Rice: 14:44
So I remember sitting in the office in Chicago and an announcement came over the public address system.

Family members and friends learn of the terrible tragedy. Children of the agents remember their father.

Audio Transcript

Matthew Vanderhorst: 0:01
Welcome to part two of Lost Heroes. Missing money.

Retired FBI Agent Ross Rice: 0:06
Flying down there with this suspect as part of a plea agreement to try and find and recover those funds.

Joni Konstantelos: 0:13
We knew what our dad did, but we didn’t really know the danger.

Retired Firefighter Frank Lerner: 0:18
We were all standing there talking and also on that plane just went right across in front of us. Oh, my God.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 0:30
Johnny Konstantopoulos agent Mike Lynch’s daughter remembers when FBI agents came to her Illinois home to tell her family about the crash.

Joni Konstantelos: 0:38
I remember walking home from school that day with one of my little girlfriends and kind of coming down the hill and seeing several cars parked in front of my house. And my first thought is a seven year old is. Hmm. Or maybe we’re having a surprise party for my dad.

Amy Frederick: 0:54
Agent Terry Herefords Young daughter Mary Morgan remembers when agents came to her family’s home. Mary says it was her fourth birthday.

Mary Morgan: 1:02
You know, we were down the stairs to the left, playing in the basement. I remember looking up and seeing my mother blocking an individual in another individual. So it turned out they were the FBI agents that came to inform us. But I remember that. And I remember going upstairs after they left, my mother was on the bed crying and holding my dad’s flight jacket.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 1:24
Joanie remembers when her mother told her and her brother that her father had died.

Joni Konstantelos: 1:28
You know, I came home from school and my brother Josh had already gotten home. My mom sat down on the chair together and she got low in front of us and just said, you know how Daddy went on a plane to Cincinnati today? And we said, yes. And she said, Well, there was a plane crash and everyone died and one of us are both of us, said even Dad. And she said, Yeah, even Daddy.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 2:00
While working in the FBI’s Chicago office, Ross Rice remembers being notified about the crash.

Retired FBI Agent Ross Rice: 2:06
I can still remember sitting in the office in Chicago and an announcement came over the public address system internally that there had been a tragedy in the agent in charge was going to address the entire office so that everyone would know at the same time what happened. It would eliminate rumors and misinformation going around. And there was just a complete attitude of stunned silence that something like this would happen.

Amy Frederick: 2:37
Back in Montgomery, Phyllis Neyer, who was trapped in her burning car and rescued by firefighters, suffered burns and was hospitalized for nine weeks. She underwent surgery on her knee, which was broken in the accident.

Don Neyer: 2:48
Her recovery took quite awhile, took about a year and a half before she was totally recovered. But she came home after a number of weeks in the hospital. And then it was a recovery and it was quite traumatic the first time I took her out after the accident. Jude. She just broke into tears no matter where we were. And she would just it was just a lot of pressure for her to. She had bandages all over her face and all of her legs and all of her arms.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 3:21
The Shepherd bookstore was so badly damaged in the crash that the old house was torn down two days after the accident.

Chief Rob Penny: 3:26
When that airplane hit that building, it knocked the building a foot and a half off the foundation. The whole building literally slid off of the Rock Foundation that was on. So and that was just from the explosion.

Chief Paul Wright: 3:42
Our city manager at the time, Dean Sterling, he had ordered that the house be destroyed and because it was a public nuisance right off the bat. So within the first couple of days, they brought in some demolition equipment and had the house razed and taken away.

Amy Frederick: 3:58
The old farmhouse was built in 1814. The Shepards had operated a bookstore in the building for 17 years before the crash happened. It took a wrecking company about an hour to tear down what was left of the home. Joseph Shepard passed away about two years after the crash. His wife, Olga, had opened another bookstore in Mount Adams. She died in 1989. Today, in Montgomery, a small office building now stands where the Shepard Bookstore once stood.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 4:24
In December 2007, 25 years after the crash, the city of Montgomery held a memorial service to honor the FBI agents that were killed in the accident.

Chief Paul Wright: 4:33
One of the things that the 25th anniversary service that we had at St Barnabas was everybody was telling their stories in front of the church with a microphone. And Mr. Neyer said, Is Frank Learner here? Frank stood up in the church and he said, I’ve never got to meet you or thank you for saving my wife’s life. So 25 years later, the two of them finally made that connection.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 4:59
Firefighter Frank Lerner remembers seeing the Snyders at the memorial service.

Retired Firefighter Frank Lerner: 5:04
She and her husband were there then, and that was the last time I had had contact with them. And they were just so appreciative and, you know, kept asking what can we do something for you? You know, I was doing my job. I’m glad that she’s safe. And I know she went through quite a bit with her burns.

Don Neyer: 5:25
You know, he was a life saver. He saved her life totally. She couldn’t have made it without him. Pulling her out of the car was totally on fire.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 5:33
Through the years, there have been various memorial services for the agents.

Joni Konstantelos: 5:37
Every year, the FBI Retired Agents Association on the death anniversary date of an agent. Someone will go and place a flag on the agent’s grave.

Amy Frederick: 5:52
Mary shared her thoughts about her father, Terry Hereford. She says she can remember sitting on his lap watching the Chicago Bears play football. Agent Hereford was a Vietnam veteran who received a Purple Heart. He was an FBI agent for three years before his death.

Mary Morgan: 6:07
He was a hero. I mean, he was very driven to do the right thing. That was my dad. That’s what I remember. That’s what all of us kind of have within ourselves that we got from him was this fierce feeling of needing to do the right thing always. I mean, my dad, you know, went to Vietnam. He has a Purple Heart. He went to serve his country. You know, he had this desire to do the right thing. He was beloved by the rest of the family, by my aunts. And he just had this charismatic way about him that was that people were drawn to.

Amy Frederick: 6:50
Joanie remembers her father, Mike Lynch, is a man who protected the family and enjoyed making homemade ice cream for his children. Agent Lynch served with the FBI for six years before his death.

Joni Konstantelos: 7:02
I felt different and a little bit weird because everyone most everyone had two parents and I didn’t. And as I got to be older and have children of my own, it hit me from all different angles, from my mom’s point of view, losing her husband and having to raise kids on her own. And from my dad’s point of view, I see my husband, you know, and how close he is to our girls. And I thought, my gosh, what you missed out on. And then as I see my own girls and at the age I was, I think, wow, that’s how old I was. And you guys have all these memories of your dad, and I don’t.

Amy Frederick: 7:45
Ross remembers the four agents as his friends.

Retired FBI Agent Ross Rice: 7:49
They were all wonderful guys. They were all people that if you knew them and this happened, you would want to sit down after work and have a beer with them or be involved with them socially, which I was with Mike. And it’s like losing a good friend. And it just is. Even talking about it today is difficult.

Amy Frederick: 8:22
While Phyllis was badly hurt, she survived the crash. Phyllis and her husband Don, were married for 63 years. Phyllis near died in 2016. They are now more than 100 members of the Neyer family.

Don Neyer: 8:34
My whole life was with her and the time I was an adult. We got married when he was 21 and I was 22, and so we had a lot of good time together and then accidentally separated us and all and strengthened our marriage. But it was just a quiet, traumatic thing. But it certainly didn’t do anything to diminish our love for each other.

Retired Firefighter Frank Lerner: 9:03
Everybody did such a good job and it’s hard to single out anybody at all. I mean, everybody had to know there was a job to be done. Everybody did their job. And at the end of the day. Folks that we could save got saved. I think there couldn’t have been a better group there.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 9:27
The Montgomery Fire Department and firefighters and paramedics from nearly a dozen other departments responded to the crash. Police departments from Montgomery and officers from other departments helped secure the accident scene.

Amy Frederick: 9:40
Lost in the crash were FBI agent and pilot. Terry Harford. Agent and co Pilot. Robert Connors. Agents Michael Lynch. And Charles Ellington.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 9:49
Terry Burnett HEREFORD was born in Pomona, California. Agent Hereford was a Vietnam War veteran of the US Army who had received a Purple Heart. He had served with the FBI for three years. Agent Terry Hereford was married with four children.

Amy Frederick: 10:03
Robert W Connors was born in Lima, Ohio. Special Agent Connors was a US Air Force veteran and had served with the FBI for four years. Robert Connors was married with four children.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 10:14
Michael James Lynch was born in Dayton, Ohio. Special Agent Lynch was a US Air Force veteran and he had served with the FBI for six years. Michael Lynch was married with four children.

Amy Frederick: 10:25
Charles Lawrence Ellington was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He served four years in the Marines. Agent Ellington entered the FBI in December 1979 and worked in Atlanta before transferring to Chicago, where he was assigned to white collar crimes. Charles Ellington was married with one daughter.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 10:42
Carl Henry Johnson. The accused embezzler was also killed in the crash. He left behind a wife and three children. Retired Chicago Police detective Patrick Daley, who was hired by Johnson’s lawyer to escort him to Ohio, was also killed in the crash.

Amy Frederick: 10:58
The FBI says the crash was an accident. Investigators say there were indications that the aircraft encountered altitude readout problems which may have caused it to fly at a low altitude. The secret location of the money may have died with Carl Henri Johnson that day. The FBI has never said where the missing money is. Johnson’s lawyer reportedly told his client to lead agents to the money and not disclose its location beforehand. While over the years, people have tried looking for the missing money, no one has ever reported finding it.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 11:31
Thank you for listening to Lost Heroes Missing Money. We leave you with thoughts from Joni Konstantopoulos and what she wants everyone to remember about law enforcement and officers everywhere.

Joni Konstantelos: 11:42
When law enforcement gets up and goes to work, they absolutely don’t know if they’re coming home. We need to honor them and acknowledge the sacrifice that they and their families make. These people are there when we need them. They’re the ones running into the buildings when everyone’s running out. And I just think that regardless of what’s going on in the world, we need to really remember that these are people, they’re heroes every day, and their families sacrifice a lot. It’s not an easy job. We need to just really be thankful.

During our research, we found some information about the four FBI agents and the embezzler that we think you will find interesting but didn’t make it into the main story.

Audio Transcript

Matthew Vanderhorst: 0:01
Thank you for listening to Lost Heroes, Missing Money. During this bonus episode, Amy and I will talk about the background of the four agents and the embezzler and share some information that we think you’ll find interesting but didn’t quite make it into the main story. Also, if you haven’t already listened to the first two episodes, we encourage you to listen to them first.

Amy Frederick: 0:19
Now. We faced a few challenges while researching this project. Matthew, why don’t you talk a little bit about that?

Matthew Vanderhorst: 0:24
Well, remember, this happened in 1982. There was no Internet, which means there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no Tik Tok or anything like that. There were no personal computers, at least none that were connected to the Internet. There were no cell phones. Cable TV wasn’t widespread yet. In fact, CNN, just started two years prior to the strategy. We mainly relied on interviews, old newspaper articles and TV reports and information. So really, the information we had to go on was pretty slim.

Amy Frederick: 0:51
Yeah, I think so, too. But even with these challenges, I think we were able to come up with a compelling story and properly recognize the agents in their families. So let’s start with the embezzler, Carl Henry Johnson Since this tragedy really wouldn’t have happened without him. We learned that Johnson was a family man. He was 48 years old with a wife and three sons. He and his wife were estranged at the time. He had worked at a Chicago bank, and his boss described him as someone who was quiet and came to work and did his job. So it was shocking. We left one day with $640,000 of the bank’s money.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 1:21
And we know he split with the cash. He went on the run, came to Cincinnati and lived under assumed name of Ed SHAPIRO. I think that was one of the three aliases that he had. But that’s the one we know of. He didn’t really stay hidden when he was in Cincinnati. We knew he joined the Unicorners Reading Dancing Club. But after spending some time in Cincinnati, he disappeared again and spent a lot of his time in San Diego.

Amy Frederick: 1:41
Another thing that we found interesting is that during this time, while he was on the run, the FBI searched for Johnson. They even looked throughout the world. They focused on countries like Zimbabwe, which had no extradition agreements with the U.S. at the time.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 1:54
You know, after 70 years, he got tired of being on the run and turned himself in. He told his parents that he grabbed the money out of the bank vault while feeling depressed about his recent separation from his wife, Lois. He led FBI agents to some of the money, including in a church, a Chicago area nature preserve, and his parents house, which was in Chicago.

Amy Frederick: 2:10
Now, during this time, while Johnson was on the run, his wife, Lois, she had her husband declared dead so she could collect more than $22,000 in life insurance. Lois was also worried that the bank might find her liable for the stolen money. So she filed for divorce.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 2:24
And, Amy, you might think that after all that Lois went through, she might be angry at her husband, but she reportedly said she still loved him. She actually waited at her house all those years waiting for him to come home. In fact, there was a quote in a news article that said every time the doorbell rang or the somebody knocked at the door, she thought it was him. She and her three sons all had warm feelings about Carl.

Amy Frederick: 2:43
So just looking at that and thinking, after researching this project and learning more about Carl Henry Johnson, Matthew, what are your thoughts about him?

Matthew Vanderhorst: 2:51
Well, he was a criminal. He admitted to what he did. It wasn’t a secret or anything, but he wasn’t a violent guy. At least he didn’t come across as that. He just made that colossally bad decision that led to him losing his life and five others.

Amy Frederick: 3:05
Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I kind of feel like he was a family man that one day made a really, really poor decision. And unfortunately, it resulted in a tragedy. So now that we’ve talked about our embezzler let’s talk about our heroes, our four FBI agents.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 3:20
The agents were Charles Ellington, Robert Connors, Terry Hereford, and Mike Lynch. All of them served the country in the military. They were all in their mid-thirties and they all left behind young families.

Amy Frederick: 3:29
Let’s take a closer look at Charles Ellington. He was a marine and before the FBI he was a police officer in Atlanta, Georgia. One of the cases he worked on was the disappearance and murder of 20 children. You may have heard of this case. It’s commonly called the Atlanta Child murders. One man was arrested for those crimes. And the FBI said because of the Ellington’s work on the case, he saved lives. Charles Ellington was married and he had a ten year old daughter.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 3:53
Terry Hereford served in the Army. He was wounded in action in Vietnam and received the Purple Heart. He also had a master’s degree in clinical psychology and served as the director of psychological services at a San Diego hospital before becoming an FBI agent. He was also a licensed pilot, and he, too, was a family man. He had a wife and four children.

Amy Frederick: 4:12
Robert Connors, known to his friends as Bob. He was one of two agents that was born here in Ohio. He’s from Dayton and he served in the Air Force serving as a pilot and a pilot instructor. Now, Connors was very experienced. He had about 3000 flying hours. He was also married with four children. And another part of his life that we learned that he had a twin brother that was killed in military action.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 4:34
Mike Lynch was our other agent from Ohio. He was from Lima. Lynch was also in the Air Force. He received a Distinguished Flying Cross for a mission that he was part of that dropped supplies at the Battle of Kazan. He joined the FBI and first served in Indianapolis before transferring to Chicago. The FBI said that he was instrumental in the investigation and conviction of Teamsters President Roy Williams. He tried to bribe a senator to bring down a bill that impacted the trucking industry. Mike Lynch was also married. He had four children. His youngest was one at the time of the plane crash.

Amy Frederick: 5:04
Such a tragedy. I mean, these men went to work that day as Joni had talked about in our podcast. They had every expectation of coming home. It’s just such a tragedy that this plane went down and took their lives.

Matthew Vanderhorst: 5:18
All the agents were young. They all had young families. Which makes it even harder. They didn’t die in a firefight or any dangerous situation like that. It was just an accident. And it’s an accident that didn’t have to happen if it wasn’t for one poor decision of one man seven years prior.

Amy Frederick: 5:37
That’s right. So we want to thank you for listening to Lost Heroes, missing money. We want to give a special thank you to all the people we interviewed for this podcast.